


where i can scream how i love you

by schrodingers_zombie



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 6000 Years of Pining (Good Omens), Anxious Crowley (Good Omens), Emotional Repression, Love Confessions, M/M, Other, [looks at my own issues with intimacy and expressing my feelings] this is crowley actually, hear that whirring? that's the sound of me being a projector
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-07-19 18:18:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19978432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schrodingers_zombie/pseuds/schrodingers_zombie
Summary: demons, generally, have no trouble saying the words "i love you". after all, lying is a sin.but crowley keeps choking on the sound.the problem is that it's true, and he's a being fundamentally devoid of love, and his reality couldn't handle the contradiction. if he opens up, would it tear him apart?





	where i can scream how i love you

**Author's Note:**

> why must a fanfic be "good"? is it not enough to use lots of purple prose to express your own anxieties and repressed emotions and live vicariously through their happy endings?
> 
> anyway this one was inspired by mitski's "i want you" (that's where the title is from) because that's apparently how i get ideas nowadays but it's not really related to the song at all. other than that's a very good crowley pining song go listen to it and come back when you're done

Demons, generally, have no trouble saying the words “I love you.” After all, lying is a sin, and that’s what they’re good at.

But Crowley keeps choking on the sound, on the shape of the words in his throat. As if the syllables themselves are blessed and holy, each letter burning heaven into his tongue. Like swallowing poison or razor blades or angelic fire, eating away at his insides.

It shouldn’t come up that often. Crowley has never been a fan of the more physical routes to temptation that some demons take pleasure in, where sweet false words and phrases could help ease a human into giving in. And yet it keeps happening. He walks out of a restaurant, heads to the Bentley with a casual wave, barely keeps a quick “love you” from boiling over and scalding his mouth. He’s drunk and laughing and rolling his eyes and an exasperated “I love you” threatens to rip his tongue out charred and smoking. He sits on a bench in a park and the sun is setting and the wind is soft and he can feel the words ready to erupt in lava and ash and clouds of death.

At times, saying Aziraphale’s name feels the same. Sometimes, especially early on, before Crowley had let himself admit what he felt even to himself, he thought it was the G-d in it, the אל carved out and blinding bright in every angel. But that isn’t it, not all of it, at least. He is afraid. Scared that one day he would try to say “Aziraphale” and instead it would come out “I love you” and he would ignite, burn from the inside out in the savage holiness of it all. He’d stood on the consecrated ground of a church, felt the scorching heat of holy water even through a tartan thermos. But how much more it must hurt to make yourself the sacred, make your words the prayer. It would be worse than Falling.

He stands in front of a mirror, sometimes, alone in his flat, stares at his own sharp yellow eyes. Snake eyes. Demon eyes. Not meant to look upon an angel like he does. He stands and shakes and imagines holiness ripping his skin apart and tearing his soul into nothing, and he tries to force his mouth around the shapes of the words. Demons don’t cry but when he pulls himself away and sinks, shuddering, mouth aching, onto his cold bed, his cheeks are wet.

He can’t break apart and burn away and disappear completely like a magician’s flash paper like that. Not outside. Not in front of those eyes. So instead he says “little demonic miracle of my own,” and “I’ll do that one, my treat,” and “I’ll give you a lift,” and “angel,” and “angel,” and “angel,” and hopes that Aziraphale hears what he means. And every time, Aziraphale doesn’t. Doesn’t hear what Crowley doesn’t say. But that’s what he really wants, isn’t it? Not to let that light in. Only letting Aziraphale’s lack of response singe his outer edges, never letting him reach inside and crush his fragile, flammable heart.

And one day everything happens and Crowley runs to him and all he finds is what he expected all along. He says his name, screams it, lets it burst out of him like a dying sun. He screams “Aziraphale” and it’s I love you, I loved you, this isn’t _fair_. And he was right: it burns. Burns like a thousand books ending permanently all at once, burns like melting shattered sunglasses, burns like a heart crying into an empty room. And he was right: Aziraphale isn’t there to hear it. And he was right. His angel is gone and it burns.

When he sees Aziraphale again, through a haze of alcohol and tears, he’s not sure if it’s real. But it doesn’t matter. He’s been through being consumed and torn apart and everything burned out of him as reflecting flames danced and taunted around him, and somehow his body had survived, and the inferno he needs to drive through is nothing compared to that. And if there’s a chance Aziraphale will be on the other side, there’s no way in Hell—in Heaven—there’s no _fucking_ way he’s not surviving this fire as well. And so he _does_. And that’s “I love you” too, another one that Aziraphale can’t hear.

He still can’t say it. Not so anyone can hear. After all that, and he still can’t say it. They wait on a bench together and he can’t. They sit next to each other on a bus that is somehow going to London and he can’t. They’re standing outside of his flat and slowly, not looking, he reaches out a hand, and Aziraphale takes it. And he doesn’t burst into flame.

They sit side by side on a couch that may or may not have existed before, hands still clasped tight together. There’s two glasses of wine on a table but neither of them drink; that would mean moving apart. Crowley doesn’t know if he can say it but he wants to, wants to tell Aziraphale what his heart is begging him to say out loud. His eyes dart around the room: Aziraphale’s face, the floor, the ceiling, the door, Aziraphale’s face. As if an answer, a way to let his mouth say those words without discorporating, would be written somewhere there.

“I love you,” his angel says.

Crowley makes a sound that gay teens on the internet would probably represent with what they call a keysmash.

Their hands are still touching. Intertwined. They don’t need a heartbeat to keep their bodies alive, technically, but Crowley can still feel Aziraphale’s and his pulses thundering in sync.

“That’s really not fair,” he says. “I’ve been trying to say that for 6000 years. Can’t believe you did it first, you bastard.”

Then they’re laughing, and Aziraphale pulls him close and they’re pressed together, Crowley’s face buried in Aziraphale’s neck, breathing him in.

“It’s not a competition, my dear,” Aziraphale murmurs into Crowley’s hair. “I think we _both_ have a lot of catching up to do.”

“I love you, angel. Aziraphale. I love you,” Crowley says, and has it really been that easy all along? Was that what he’s been so afraid of all this time? Nobody caught on fire. Nobody died. The simplest thing in the world. He’s smiling and his mouth aches.

He says it again for good measure. “I love you.”

It does, he thinks later, feel like fire. It feels like standing in a pillar of hellfire and grinning while angels cower. It does feel like holiness. It feels like bathing in holy water and asking for a rubber duck. “To the world,” he toasts, and then “I love you,” because it’s like a dam has been broken and now he can’t stop saying it. But then again, he doesn’t want to stop, not at all, not ever.


End file.
